John Hope Franklin (January 2, 1915 – March 25, 2009) was an American historian who focused on the history of the United States. He is best known for his work From Slavery to Freedom, first published in 1947 and continually updated. More than three million copies have been sold.
Born in Oklahoma, Franklin attended Fisk University and then Harvard University, receiving his doctorate in 1941. He was a professor at Howard University, and in 1956 was named to head the history department at Brooklyn College, part of the City University of New York. Recruited to the University of Chicago in 1964, he eventually led the history department and was appointed to a named chair. He then moved to Duke University in 1983, as an appointee to a named chair in history.
He was a president of Phi Beta Kappa, the Organization of American Historians, the American Historical Association, the American Studies Association, and the Southern Historical Association. In 1995, he was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the nation's highest civilian honor.
Early life and education Franklin was born in Rentiesville, Oklahoma, in 1915 to attorney Buck (Charles) Colbert Franklin and his wife Mollie (Parker) Franklin."Obituary: John Hope Franklin", The Charlotte Observer, March 25, 2009. He was named after John Hope, a prominent educator who was the first African-American president of Atlanta University."John Hope (1868–1936)" , New Georgia Encyclopedia online
Franklin graduated from Booker T. Washington High School (then segregated) in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He graduated in 1935 from Fisk University, a historically black university in Nashville, Tennessee, then earned a master's degree in 1936 and a doctorate in history in 1941 from Harvard University. Two fellowships (1937 and 1938) from the Rosenwald Fund enabled him to study for his PhD at Harvard.
Father
Buck Colbert Franklin was a civil rights lawyer, also known as "Amazing Buck Franklin," of African-American and Choctaw ancestry, born in the Chickasaw Nation in western Indian Territory (formerly Pickens County). He was the seventh of ten children born to David and Milley Franklin. David was a former slave, who became a Chickasaw Freedman when emancipated after the American Civil War. Milley was born free before the war and was of one-fourth Choctaw and three-fourths African-American ancestry.
Buck Franklin is best known for defending African-American survivors of the 1921 Tulsa race massacre, in which whites had attacked many blacks and buildings, and burned and destroyed the Greenwood District. This was known at the time as the "Black Wall Street," and was the wealthiest Black community in the United States, a center of black commerce and culture.John Hope Franklin, John Whittington Franklin, editors, My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin, Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press, 1997. In 2015, Buck Franklin's previously unknown written eyewitness account of the 1921 Greenwood attack, a 10-page typewritten manuscript, was discovered and subsequently obtained by the Smithsonian's National Museum of African American History and Culture. Franklin and his colleagues also became experts at oil law, representing "blacks and Native Americans in Oklahoma against white lawyers representing oil barons."J. Clay Smith, Jr. "Review: 'My Life and an Era: The Autobiography of Buck Colbert Franklin' by John Hope Franklin; John Whittington Franklin; Buck Colbert Franklin", Law and History Review, Vol. 17, No. 1, Spring 1999. Retrieved November 26, 2014 . His career demonstrated a strong professional black life in the West, at a time when such accomplishments would have been more difficult to achieve in the Deep South.
Career "My challenge," Franklin said, "was to weave into the fabric of American history enough of the presence of blacks so that the story of the United States could be told adequately and fairly."
In his autobiography, Franklin has described a series of formative incidents in which he confronted racism while seeking to volunteer his services at the beginning of the Second World War. He responded to the navy's search for qualified clerical workers, but after he presented his extensive qualifications, the navy recruiter told him that he was the wrong color for the position. He was similarly unsuccessful in finding a position with a War Department historical project. When he went to have a blood test, as required for the draft, the doctor initially refused to allow him into his office. Afterward, Franklin took steps to avoid the draft, on the basis that the country did not respect him or have an interest in his well-being, because of his color.
According to his article, To and From Brown v. Board of Education, written upon the 50th anniversary of Brown and Bolling, Franklin says that Thurgood Marshall recruited him to help respond to the Supreme Court questions in response to the 5 cases brought. Specifically they wanted both sides to address the question of whether or not those who wrote and passed the Fourteenth Amendment also meant the elimination of segregation in the public schools.
Since Marshall and his colleagues were not that knowledgeable in the history of Reconstruction, he asked Franklin to work together with Woodward to develop the legal responses. Franklin continued to teach and then spent three days a week at the offices of the NAACP Legal Defense Fund to gather supporting evidence regarding Reconstruction and constitutional history on the topic. This included strategies and intentions of Southern leaders who perpetuated and enforced segregation. One of the papers he wrote was published as "Jim Crow Goes to School: The Genesis of Legal Segregation in Southern Schools". In a landmark ruling, it ruled in 1954 that the legal segregation of black and white children in public schools was unconstitutional, leading to integration of schools.
Professor and researcher Franklin's teaching career"Obituary of John Hope Franklin," John Hope Franklin Center, Duke University (retrieved May 23, 2014). began at Fisk University. During World War II, he taught at St. Augustine's College from 1939 to 1943 and the North Carolina College for Negroes, currently North Carolina Central University from 1943 to 1947.
From 1947 to 1956, he taught at Howard University. In 1956, Franklin was selected to chair the history department at Brooklyn College, the first person of color to head a major history department. Franklin served there until 1964, when he was recruited by the University of Chicago. He spent 1962 as a visiting professor at the University of Cambridge, holding the Professorship of American History and Institutions.
David Levering Lewis said that while he was deciding to become a historian, he learned that Franklin, his mentor, had been named departmental chairman at Brooklyn College.
Now that certainly is a distinction. It had never happened before that a person of color had chaired a major history department. That meant a lot to me. If I had doubt about (the) viability of a career in history, that example certainly helped put to rest such concerns.
In researching his prize-winning biography of W. E. B. Du Bois, Lewis said he became aware of Franklin's
courage during that period in the 1950s when Du Bois became an un-person, when many progressives were tarred and feathered with the brush of subversion. John Hope Franklin was a rock; he was loyal to his friends. In the case of W. E. B. Du Bois, Franklin spoke out in his defense, not (about) Du Bois's communism, but of the right of an intellectual to express ideas that were not popular. I find that admirable. It was a high risk to take and we may be heading again into a period when the free concourse of ideas in the academy will have a price put upon it. In the final years of an active teaching career, I will have John Hope Franklin's example of high scholarship, great courage and civic activism.
From 1964 through 1968, Franklin was a professor of history at the University of Chicago, and chair of the department from 1967 to 1970. There he served as a member of the committee that produced the Kalven report. In 1965, he marched with Dr. Martin Luther King on the Selma to Montgomery marches. He was named to the endowed position of John Matthews Manly Distinguished Service Professor, which he held from 1969 to 1982. He was appointed to the Fulbright Board of Foreign Scholarships, 1962–1969, and was its chair from 1966 to 1969.
In 1976, the National Endowment for the Humanities selected Franklin for the Jefferson Lecture, the U.S. federal government's highest honor for achievement in the humanities.Jefferson Lecturers at NEH Website (retrieved January 22, 2009). Franklin's three-part lecture became the basis for his book Racial Equality in America.John Hope Franklin, Racial Equality in America (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1993), .
Franklin was appointed to the U.S. Delegation to the UNESCO General Conference, Belgrade (1980).
In 1983, Franklin was appointed as the James B. Duke Professor of History at Duke University. In 1985, he took emeritus status from this position. During this same year, he helped to establish the Durham Literacy Center and served on its Board until his death in 2009.Lewis Kendall, "Durham Literacy Center changing homes, lives", . NewsObserver, July 30, 2012.
Franklin was also Professor of Legal History at the Duke University Law School from 1985 to 1992.
Racial Equality in America Racial Equality in America is the published lecture series that Franklin presented in 1976 for the Jefferson Lecture sponsored by the National Endowment for Humanities. The book is composed of three lectures, given in three different cities, in which Franklin chronicled the history of race in the United States from revolutionary times to 1976. These lectures explore the differences between some of the beliefs related to race with the reality documented in various historical and government texts, as well as data gathered from census, property, and literary sources. The first lecture is titled "The Dream Deferred" and discusses the period from the Revolution to 1820. The second lecture is titled "The Old Order Changeth Not" and discusses the rest of the 19th century. The third lecture is titled "Equality Indivisible" and discusses the 20th century.
Later life and death In 2005, at the age of 90, Franklin published and lectured Franklin, John Hope (November 1, 2005). Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. Library of Congress, John W. Kluge Center. Retrieved on September 3, 2009 on his new autobiography, Mirror to America: The Autobiography of John Hope Franklin. In 2006, Mirror to America received the Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice and Human Rights Book Award, which is given annually to honor authors "whose writing, in illuminating past or present injustice, acts as a beacon towards a more just society.""RFK Book Awards ." Robert F. Kennedy Center for Justice & Human Rights. Retrieved October 17, 2015. In the past the Center's website described the purpose of the award with a different formulation that referred more specifically to Kennedy's legacy; see the registration information disseminated in 2015: .
In 2006, he also received the John W. Kluge Prize and as the recipient lectured on the successes and failures of race relations in America in Where do We Go from Here?Franklin, John Hope (March 6, 2007). John Hope Franklin: Where Do We Go from Here? Library of Congress, John W. Kluge Center. Retrieved on September 3, 2009. In 2008, Franklin endorsed presidential candidate Barack Obama."John Hope Franklin backs Obama", The News & Observer, April 16, 2008. Available online.
Franklin died at Duke University Medical Center on the morning of March 25, 2009.
Honors